As is well-known in certain circles, my choice to go to Greensboro for my MFA was initially dictated by financial considerations: Greensboro takes care of its students, while Columbia expects them to cough up thirty thousand dollars to attend every year, not to mention what it costs to live in NYC. I don't regret coming here a bit. Greensboro's been a very good and incredibly supportive place to be these last few years, while everything I've heard since about the Columbia program suggests to me that I made the right call.

Consider, for example, this letter from a professor recently denied tenure at Columbia School of the Arts in the Columbia Spectator, via Bookslut.

There is no point in being coy. Despite the presence of a small minority of talented and committed faculty members and an equally small core of serious, gifted students, what prevails at the writing division in the School of the Arts, and to some extent at the School of the Arts as a whole, is an institutionalized and self-perpetuating culture of mediocrity so out of step with the general climate of excellence for which Columbia is rightly known that most would be shocked to be apprised of the details. A senior colleague of mine recently put it quite neatly: “Leaderless, rudderless, standardless. The worst among us sense the vacuum and rush to fill it with their own kind. So sad. How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so.” I would like to believe otherwise.

...

The overall climate of mediocrity to which I refer extends to the standards—or, more precisely, the lack of standards—to which students are held. Grading options for all courses are pass/fail. No one fails. The few theses that are failed because they are unreadable—by mavericks like myself and a few others—are often mysteriously changed to a passing grade after a few cosmetic changes have been made—a process which undeniably cheapens the value of a Columbia MFA and does a profound disservice to the truly outstanding students Columbia still manages to attract. When I inquired at a faculty meeting last spring, whether there was finally any level of writing low enough to merit a failing grade in the Columbia writing division, I was told by one tenured colleague—to general nervous laughter—that she felt bad failing anyone paying so much money. This is shameful enough. Add the fact that when compared with its peer institutions the writing division at Columbia is an unconscionably bloated program which brings in more students every year—with the predictable effect on quality—while offering a minute amount of financial aid, what we have is something resembling a diploma mill hiding, unbelievably, under the Columbia name.